Matthew Perry Dead at 54 After Apparent Drowning: Report
Matthew Perry has reportedly died at the age of 54.
TMZ reports that Perry was found dead in a jacuzzi at a home in Los Angeles on Saturday, October 28. Police rushed to the scene responding to a call of cardiac arrest, the outlet reported. Representatives for Perry did not immediately respond to Us Weekly's request for comment.
Perry rose to fame as Chandler Bing on the beloved sitcom Friends, which aired from 1994 to 2004, alongside Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc and David Schwimmer.
Perry was candid about his ups and downs over the years, revealing in his 2022 book that he was only sober during season 9 of the sitcom.
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“You can track the trajectory of my addiction if you gauge my weight from season to season — when I’m carrying weight, it’s alcohol; when I’m skinny, it’s pills. When I have a goatee, it’s lots of pills,” he wrote in Friends, Lovers & The Big Terrible Thing. “[Compare] how I look between the final episode of season 6 and the first of season 7 . I’m wearing the same clothes in the final episode of six and the first of 7 [it’s supposed to be the same night], but I must have lost fifty pounds in the off-season.”
Perry wrote that his costars tried to support him.
"In nature, when a penguin is injured, the other penguins group around it and prop it up until it’s better. This is what my costars on Friends did for me," he wrote. "But still, the addiction ravaged me. One time, in a scene in the coffeehouse when I’m dressed in a suit, I fell asleep right there on the couch, and disaster was averted only when Matt LeBlanc nudged me awake right before my line; no one noticed, but I knew how close I’d come."
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Perry went to rehab 15 times over the years, telling People in 2022 that he almost died at age 49 after his colon burst from opioid overuse. "The doctors told my family that I had a 2 percent chance to live," he said. "I was put on a thing called an ECMO machine, which does all the breathing for your heart and your lungs. And that's called a Hail Mary. No one survives that."
He added at the time that sobriety is still a struggle.
"It's important, but if you lose your sobriety, it doesn't mean you lose all that time and education," he said. "Your sober date changes, but that's all that changes. You know everything you knew before, as long as you were able to fight your way back without dying, you learn a lot."
In addition to Friends, Perry starred on TV shows Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Go On and The Odd Couple, and movies Fools Rush In, The Whole Nine Yards and 17 Again.
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In 2021, Perry reunited with his Friends costars for an HBO Max special.
“I felt like I was gonna die if they didn’t laugh. It’s not healthy for sure, but I would sometimes say a line and they wouldn’t laugh, and I would sweat and go into convulsions,” Perry said of filming all 10 seasons of this sitcom in front of a live studio audience. “If I didn’t get the laugh I was supposed to get, I would freak out. I felt like that every single night.”
Perry is survived by his dad, John Bennett Perry, and mom Suzanne Perry.
